An Ideological Ally for Belgrade

Attila Hoare

Apologists for Communism and Western Cold Warriors, though from opposing trenches,
tended to agree on one point at least where the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe and the
Soviet Union were concerned. They saw a complete dichotomy between a-national Communism
and the national-democratic (or bourgeois-reactionary) socio-political orders that had gone
before. The events of 1989-91 in this view represented a sharp break: a victory for liberal
democracy and/or reactionary nationalism over Communism. In the former Yugoslavia and the
Caucasus, in particular, this break was accompanied by bloody wars of succession, and former
Cold War antagonists in the West have often joined in lamenting the passing of the 'Communist
man's burden', whereby authoritarian but impartial Marxism-Leninism 'kept the lid on ethnic
conflict'. From here it is only a short step to support for the attempts of the imperial centres,
Moscow and Belgrade, to 'restore order' among the tribes. Thus Walter Laqueur, in his vitriolic
anti-Communist polemic against even the most vaguely pro-Soviet intellectuals and historians
(The Dream that Failed, Oxford, 1994), did not think it odd simultaneously to praise the Soviet
regime's murderous occupation of the Azerbaijani capital of Baku in 1990, stating baldly that 'the
intention of Russian forces was to restore law and order'.

The ideological strait-jacket of the Cold War has been a particular barrier to efforts to
understand the break-up of Yugoslavia. Those who have bothered to look at its history during
World War II know well that Tito's Partisans, who brought the Communists to power in
Yugoslavia, constituted a heterogenous force if ever there was one, including as it did Croats
fighting for Croatian sovereignty, Serbs fighting to unite all Serbs within a single state and
Bosnians fighting for Bosnian statehood. Alongside the original anti-fascist patriots, the Partisan
ranks came to include by the end of the war former Ustashe, Chetniks and Muslim SS recruits.
Yet post-war historians consistently mistook form for content, seeing in Communism the
negation, rather than the uneasy reconciliation, of Yugoslavia's conflicting national projects.
Since 1991, a wealth of books have appeared arguing that, once the undemocratic but anti-
national Communist order began to break down in the 1980s under the impact of an economic
crisis, its antithesis spontaneously and inevitably re-emerged: irrational but popular 'rival
nationalisms' that plunged Yugoslavia into war. Since the war was caused by the 'collapse of
Communism', it followed that it could have been avoided if only elements of the Communist
Yugoslav old order had been propped up, such as those represented by Yugoslavia's reformist
and centralist last Prime Minister, Ante Markovic or, more ominously, by the Yugoslav People's
Army (JNA) seen here as a force of 'law and order'. The secession of Slovenia and Croatia, and
their subsequent recognition by the EC, are regularly presented as the actions most responsible
for the outbreak and prolongation of war. Although the principles of Croatian and Slovenian
sovereignty were integral elements of Yugoslav constitutionalism, and although the JNA in 1991
was hardly an impartial defender of the 'brotherhood and unity' of the Yugoslav nations, writers
of this ilk have persisted in viewing the crumbling Yugoslav state, stained as it already was with
the blood of thousands of its own citizens, as the only bulwark against 'rival nationalisms'
analysed with equal vagueness (form once again being confused with content), so that Serbian
nationalism appears as just one nationalism among many, and not necessarily the worst.

Each writer adhering to this line of reasoning implants on it the stamp of his or her own
political or professional background. Susan Woodward's book is the most extensive version to
date. Writing as a one-time advisor to UN Special Envoy Yasushi Akashi, her thesis is familiar
enough: economic and constitutional collapse coupled with widespread social despair created a
void that the rival leaders of the Yugoslav national groups sought to fill through mutually
exclusive national projects. She writes euphemistically that 'fundamental disputes' concerned 'the
locus of sovereignty and of new borders that had been created by the breakup of the state' (p.13) -
in rather the same way, she might have reminded us, as the 1939 dispute between Germany and
Poland over the 'locus of sovereignty and of new borders' was created by the collapse of the
Versailles settlement.

Woodward's book shows how easy the passage is from identification with the centralized
Yugoslav state and Army to support for Serbian nationalism. Criticism of republican autonomy
vis-à-vis the Federal centre is a frequent theme, seamlessly extended to opposition to the
overwhelmingly Albanian province of Kosova's autonomy vis-à-vis the republic of Serbia.
Describing 'Milosevic's objective' as 'to restore the constitutional integrity of the republic [of
Serbia] by ending the extensive autonomy granted Kosovo and Vojvodina by the 1974
Constitution' (p.94), she dismisses Albanian claims to self-determination on the grounds that
'their constitutional classification' - by that same 1974 constitution, presumably! - 'as a
nationality rather than a constituent nation made them ineligible for such rights' (p.106). She
subsequently criticizes the EC's call for the restoration of Kosova's autonomy in 1991, 'which
was the very problem of the 1974 Constitution that Serbia had spent the 1980s attempting to
reverse' (p. 182). This contrasts sharply with her treatment of the Serb minorities in Croatia and
Bosnia and, by implication, Croatia's and Bosnia's own claims to 'constitutional integrity'. She
writes, for instance, that in the summer of 1990 the 'Serbs in the krajina (border) region of
Croatia and Bosnia were beginning to arm in self-defense' (p. 148). And again, referring without
comment to the wholly bogus claim that Serbs owned 65% of landholdings in Bosnia, she writes
that 'the Bosnian Serb army under General Mladic pushed instead to fill in the patchwork quilt of
these landholdings to make contiguous, statelike territory', which was 'intended to ensure the
survival of the Serbs as a nation in this area' (p.269). Woodward is particularly ready to defend
the JNA, which in the course of 1991 had 'come to the defense, not only of the Yugoslav border,
but also of civil order and of minorities during violent clashes between Croats and Serbs in
Croatia in the spring' (p. 165), and which 'continuing into September 1991' had been attempting
'to provide such a neutral buffer between Serbs and Croats, particularly in eastern Croatia, so as
to dampen the fighting and create cease-fires' (p. 257). She entirely neglects to mention that this
'neutral buffer' had actually been arming Serb extremists within Croatia since the summer of
1990, since its true intention, as Yugoslavia's last Minister of Defence General Kadijevic has
publicly admitted, was to establish new borders for an expanded, Greater Serbia.

Woodward's apologies for the Serbian side contrast with her treatment of Croatia and
Slovenia. One of her favourite arguments is that Milosevic's claim to be the 'protector of Serbs
wherever they lived was the logical equivalent' of the 'identification of Slovene sovereignty and
the defense of Slovene human rights' and was 'based on an equally legitimate but alternative
concept of a nation' (p.133). Indeed Radovan Karadzic's political project simply involved
'transferring the Slovene precedent (of the right of nations to form states within a state and, if
they wish, to secede) from the republics to the constituent nations of federal Yugoslavia. His aim
was to legitimize the sovereignty of Bosnian Serbs within Bosnia' (p. 211). Elsewhere,
Woodward claims that Slovenia 'was not a state' (p. 164), and that in recognizing the
independence of Slovenia and Croatia the EC was 'not only creating new states but dissolving an
old one - Yugoslavia' (p.250). Quite apart from whitewashing the Serbian aggressive campaign,
such statements reveal an extraordinary ignorance on the part of this self-proclaimed expert on
the nature of federations in general and the Yugoslav federation in particular . In fact,
Yugoslavia, identified by Woodward solely with the central state and army based on Belgrade,
was specifically a federation of six republics and two provinces; within it Slovenia and Croatia
functioned as sovereign nation-states, with the right of veto over the central bodies' decisions.

Woodward not only defends Serb nationalism's aspirations in principle, but repeats some of its
most grotesque claims: 'The effect in Bosnia-Hercegovina of demographic changes and
emigration in the 1960s and 1970s, for example, was to complete the process begun with the
genocidal campaign in 1941-44 of reducing the Serb population from a majority to a minority' (p.
213); 'From the mid-1980s on, both Austria and the Vatican had pursued a strategy to increase
their sphere of economic and spiritual influence in central and eastern Europe, respectively' (pp.
148-9). Indeed, Austrian and German support for the Republic of Croatia's independence was 'an
extension of the German idea of citizenship through blood alone (jus sanguinis) and the
impossibility of ethnically heterogeneous states - ideas that had been at the core of fascist
ideology' (p. 206), as if Milosevic's 'alternative concept of a nation', Karadzic's quest for 'the
sovereignty of Bosnian Serbs within Bosnia' and General Mladic's work on 'filling in the
patchwork quilt' were not precisely driven by the ideology of blood and soil. By contrast,
Russia's view on the Yugoslav issue had little to do with pro-Serbian bias, 'but grew instead from
its understanding of the issues at stake as a result of its more similar experiences in the twentieth
century and contemporaneously in dealing with the national question' (p. 205): presumably
Woodward is referring here to Russia's 'similar experiences' with the Chechens and Crimean
Tartars. Despite the enormous wealth of scholarly works cited and almost a hundred pages of
notes, Woodward repeats Serb-nationalist falsehoods that no serious scholar would entertain for
a moment. One prime example is her claim that the HDZ regime in Croatia 'adopted the
historical symbols of Croatian statehood (coat of arms and flag) that had last been used by the
fascist state in 1940-45' (p.120): as every student of Croatian history knows, the red-cornered
chequerboard that adorns the Croatian flag today was used by the Socialist Republic of Croatia
within Yugoslavia, but not by the Ustashe. Another is her allegation that Serbian attacks on
hospitals were provoked by the Bosnians and Croatians themselves, in order to win international
sympathy - a serious charge for which she neglects to provide any sources.

Susan Woodward has written a long, turgid and repetitive work whose seemingly
scholarly style and pretence of objectivity mask what amounts to support for Serbian war aims
and a dislike of Germany, Austria and Croatia that borders on hatred. For another main
dimension of Woodward's thesis concerns the way in which the Germans and Americans in turn
supposedly sabotaged international attempts to resolve the conflict. This line of argument
presents few surprises for anyone familiar with the similar themes emanating from British and
French official sources throughout the wars of succession in former Yugoslavia. What makes
this book unique, however, is its revelation of the degree of ideological sympathy for Serbian
nationalist objectives that was prevalent in the highest echelons of the UN machine operating in
the countries suffering the effects of Serbian aggression. No wonder that, during her time as
adviser to Akashi, she was nicknamed 'Mrs Mladic' by members of the UNHCR working in
Bosnia-Herzegovina.